TCS Daily

The State of Islam -- 2003

Post-9/11,
there's been a lot of gnashing of teeth about the role that Islam plays
in the promotion of terrorism and general hostility to the West. It is
often stressed that Islam encompasses more than the Arab Middle East,
and should not be conflated with the ideology of Osama bin Laden or his
cronies. Surely, true Islam is not fundamentally anti-Semitic, for
example?

1.3
billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be
a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our
weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter
attack....

We
are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped
out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today
the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for
them....

We
are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms
not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully
promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that
persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal
rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most
powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world
power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains
also.

Of
late because of their power and their apparent success they have become
arrogant. And arrogant people, like angry people will make mistakes,
will forget to think.

They
are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more
mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the
future. We must seize these opportunities.

When the EuropeanUnion -- which knows from anti-Semitism -- declares that a speech is anti-Semitic, you know a line has been crossed.

The
Indonesian President, Megawati Soekarnoputri, joined a standing ovation
for her Malaysian counterpart, Mahathir Mohamad, after he called on
Muslims to consider Jews as their enemy, it has been revealed.

All
57 leaders at a Conference of Islamic Nations summit applauded the
comments, which have renewed regional tensions ahead of next week's
APEC leaders' conference. Among them were several key figures in the
post-September 11 world, including Ms Megawati; the Afghan President,
Hamid Karzai; President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

"I
don't think they (the remarks) are anti-Semitic at all. I think he was
stating the facts," Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi said.

Egyptian
Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher added: "There are people wanting to create
trouble, invent problems that do not exist... I would advise them to
read the whole speech, which was a speech addressed to Muslims asking
them to work hard and affirm their personality."

And
Fahmi Huwaidi, an Egyptian political analyst, told Aljazeera:
"Nowadays, any criticism against the Jews and the Jewish policy is
considered anti-Semitic.

"This proves how far Israel and its allies have succeeded in sanctifying Israel, preventing any side from criticising it."

He added: "Such a common view proves Muhammad's comment on the extent to which the Jewish global influence has reached."

This is how Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar tried to explain the comments away to Voice of America:
"The prime minister's statement is a statement calling for moderation,
calling not to utilize violence to achieve our objective, start to
think, look at the example of what the Jewish community achieved."

The Best Moderate Political Islam Has to Offer?

The scary and pathetic thing is, Minister Hamid Albar is correct -- relative to a lot of Muslim leaders, Mahathir's position is
moderate. Mahathir embodies the moderate face of Islam. To his credit,
he was at the helm as his country indistrialized. He was smart enough
to appreciate the importance of the rule of law and the role of markets
in fostering economic growth. He bucked the IMF's advice and imposed
capital controls during the Asian financial crisis and lived to tell
the tale. He pursued a number of policies designed to ameliorate ethnic
tensions between the poorer but more numerous Malays and the wealthier
ethnic Chinese. These feats are not easy for a developing country
leader to pull off.

And
yet, this man, the best that moderate political Islam has to offer, is
rotten with flaws. Mahathir subverted his country's democratic
traditions to suit his political purposes. He jailed his anointed
successor for having the temerity to question whether the IMF might
actually be correct. And the anti-Semitism is hardly new -- he blamed the Jews, specifically George Soros, for causing the Asian financial crisis.

The other parts of the speech spelled out very clearly what Mahathir believes should be appropriated from the West:

The
early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars,
physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all the fields of
knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their own
religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and
extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to
strengthen their defences, protect their people and give them the
Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam. At the time the
Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the
enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilisation,
respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the
world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The
Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to
access their own scholastic heritage....

But
halfway through the building of the great Islamic civilisation came new
interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by
Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology. The study of science,
medicine etc. was discouraged.

Intellectually
the Muslims began to regress. With intellectual regression the great
Muslim civilisation began to falter and wither....

We
are enjoined by our religion to prepare for the defence of the ummah.
Unfortunately we stress not defence but the weapons of the time of the
Prophet. Those weapons and horses cannot help to defend us any more. We
need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our
defence. But because we discouraged the learning of science and
mathematics etc. as giving no merit for the akhirat, today we have no
capacity to produce our own weapons for our defence. We have to buy our
weapons from our detractors and enemies. This is what comes from the
superficial interpretation of the Quran, stressing not the substance of
the Prophet's sunnah and the Quran's injunctions but rather the form,
the manner and the means used in the 1st Century of the Hijrah. And it
is the same with the other teachings of Islam. We are more concerned
with the forms rather than the substance of the words of Allah and
adhering only to the literal interpretation of the traditions of the
Prophet.

There
is actually a powerful critique of Islamic fundamentalism in this
passage -- but the critique is exclusively over means and not ends.
Mahathir explicitly denounces the use of wanton violence to exterminate
the state of Israel. He's advocating the use of brainpower -- to exterminate the state of Israel.

What
Mahathir wants is for Islamic countries to embrace modernization
without Westernization and its tacky "Jewish" traits of human rights
and democracy. However, it's no coincidence that the peak of Islam's power and influence came at a time when the religion was tolerant to scientific and religious views outside of the Quran. Although scholars Samuel Huntington and Benjamin Barber disagree, I side with the writer Jonathan Rauch
in believing that it's impossible to embrace modern science without
embracing the tolerance for free thought that is at the core of Western
liberal thought.

I
could very well be wrong, however. This is the trillion-dollar bet for
the West for the next century -- hope that the Islamic world, in
embracing modern science and technology, learns to tolerate views
outside the ummah. Or suffer the consequences of a modernized but
rigidly theocratic Islam.